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[Gigabytebob]

You can trade with kobolds after you offer items to kobolds by designating area as offering pile kobolds will take stuff from this pile like bone,wood,leather and cloth and while the pile is active no dwarf will harm them after a good month of this they will send there chief to greet your leader (expedition leader, mayor,baron,monarch,duke or count)and inform them of their alliance with you you can accept or decline this alliance if you decline they will go back to stealing from you accept and he will say they will send a trade caravan to you every summer he will then leave back to his camp when the caravan shows up it will be kobolds with wooden hand wagons holding their goods and will park them in your depot the items they will be mostly bone,wooden,leather,rock or cloth and some items they have stolen from other civs also the kobold need their own language in the raws and their needs to be hand wagons

[Shonai_Dweller]

Is kobolds lack of language a lore thing, or just game convenience (everyone's hostile to utterancers)?

[Gigabytebob]

Is kobolds lack of language a lore thing, or just game convenience (everyone's hostile to utterancers)?

idk but someone need to civilize these savages 

[FantasticDorf]

Their lack of language explicitly restricts them from being able to make peace so unless you make kobolds multi-lingual such a possibility of ever negotiating a peace especially when kobolds are very kleptomaniac is slim. Maintaining the peace without breaking dwarven laws is even harder than probably establishing it.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Their lack of language explicitly restricts them from being able to make peace so unless you make kobolds multi-lingual such a possibility of ever negotiating a peace especially when kobolds are very kleptomaniac is slim. Maintaining the peace without breaking dwarven laws is even harder than probably establishing it.

Yes, that's what the op said. They need a language to make this possible. What I was hoping to establish is if Toady specifically decided to condemn then to eternal hatred, or if Utterances is a placeholder, waiting for the day when the kobold nations rise and rejoin the speaking world. They'd be a great source of black market goods if nothing else.

[Bumber]

Interpretive dance and sad puppy-dog eyes.

These are their means of peace.

[GoblinCookie]

This is basically similar to being able to trade with bandits/criminals.  The kobolds are canonically thieves, which means a lot of what they are selling you will be stolen goods from other civs. 

[Starver]

Maybe the Chief Kobold, or else a powerful (but not necessarily revered) subordinate chosen explicitly from their number for the exception-to-the-rule/capability, is able to speak Pidgin Dwarven (etc, or else there are others with the other languages) to be the Barterer.

Exactly how trading occurs, and supports peace, amongst this seemingly kleptocratic race, remains unknown until we know more about how they manage to be unable to respect property yet form a society of their own. Maybe it's a Socialist Utopia and, having no concept of ownership, this is why wandering into your fort and picking up items they 'need' happens to create conflict in civilisations with an active sense of ownership.  Perhaps there's a feudal hierarchy that keeps inter-kobold thefts down by authoritarian regulation (being outside of their system, you are 'fair game').  Or it's a Rights Of Passage act, to be performed explicitly because of the danger (the equivalent to the Native American practice of going into battle to touch their opponent, only, with randomly added trophy as proof ("Tag Football"-wise).

And would buying/barter-swapping stolen goods from another civilisation ever be so straightforward? Is it an option to obtain items you want, against the wishes of the original/official owners?  Can one proffer the item to the rightful owner to gain a favour or get back into friendship credit? Assuming that Kobold ethics isn't of the kind where trading is an anathema to their 'sharing, whether mutually agreed-upon or not' nature?

Still, trades in stolen goods might well be the way to make/keep the peace.  They do say that good fences make good neighbours... 

[GoblinCookie]

Maybe the Chief Kobold, or else a powerful (but not necessarily revered) subordinate chosen explicitly from their number for the exception-to-the-rule/capability, is able to speak Pidgin Dwarven (etc, or else there are others with the other languages) to be the Barterer.

I don't think pidgin dwarven is the way to go at all.  Assuming that the [UTTERANCES] tag implies the vocal cords of the creature are unable to vocalize the words of the non-utterances tag then it is simply biologically impossible for kobolds to speak dwarvish and indeed vica versa. 

However both dwarves and kobolds have hands.  That means they can both communicate to each-other using sign language and also writing, especially if the writing they are using is pictographic (Egyptian Heirogyphs, Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing) as opposed to phonetic.  A great advantage of pictographic writing systems is that it is not necessary to be able to speak the language of the writer in order to be able to read it. 

Exactly how trading occurs, and supports peace, amongst this seemingly kleptocratic race, remains unknown until we know more about how they manage to be unable to respect property yet form a society of their own. Maybe it's a Socialist Utopia and, having no concept of ownership, this is why wandering into your fort and picking up items they 'need' happens to create conflict in civilisations with an active sense of ownership.  Perhaps there's a feudal hierarchy that keeps inter-kobold thefts down by authoritarian regulation (being outside of their system, you are 'fair game').  Or it's a Rights Of Passage act, to be performed explicitly because of the danger (the equivalent to the Native American practice of going into battle to touch their opponent, only, with randomly added trophy as proof ("Tag Football"-wise).

The less of a concept of property there is, the stronger society is, so from a societal strongpoint the mystery is backwards; how do the societies of creatures with a strong concept of private property simply not dissolve altogether? 

In the former situation things get interesting, in the latter situation it is basically no different from trading with bandits or other criminal elements from established society. 

And would buying/barter-swapping stolen goods from another civilisation ever be so straightforward? Is it an option to obtain items you want, against the wishes of the original/official owners?  Can one proffer the item to the rightful owner to gain a favour or get back into friendship credit? Assuming that Kobold ethics isn't of the kind where trading is an anathema to their 'sharing, whether mutually agreed-upon or not' nature?

Still, trades in stolen goods might well be the way to make/keep the peace.  They do say that good fences make good neighbours... 

The thing here is that, being thieves kobolds will generally end up with a lot of surplus junk they have stolen but which they have no real interest in.  That makes them a good market since they have a wide range of goods from a wide range of sources but which they have no real use for.  Now here is the funny thing, neither buying, nor bartering, nor even a concept of property is actually necessary in order for trade to happen.

We can simply agree to allow the kobolds to take whatever they want from 'our' stockpiles and in return we can send our folks off to take whatever *they* want from the kobolds own stockpiles, including goods originally stolen from third parties or even from ourselves.  This is all in accord to an agreement between us and them, without the agreement things go back to normal (they try to steal from us, we try to stop them).  We can also add addition conditions, so the kobolds will agree only to take things from a given stockpile, hence we control what goods they get and in return we get access to the kobolds stolen goods from other sources.

[Starver]

I don't think pidgin dwarven is the way to go at all.  Assuming that the [UTTERANCES] tag implies the vocal cords of the creature are unable to vocalize the words of the non-utterances tag then it is simply biologically impossible for kobolds to speak dwarvish and indeed vica versa.

(I'm currently reading a book where an evolved-from-canine-ancestors species is talking 'growled English' to the human characters (and other the other homonids, who are the ones who taught the canids, having picked it up themselves and usef it as their Lingua Franca, which is a bit of a stretch that I hope gets explained later!).  Anyway...  One has to imagine that even with 'utterances' (that I've never presumed to mean anything other than the tendency to be mumbly and/or sound like intejections, possibly Turets-like), it is possible for a suitable voice modulation to be possible, even if not all phonemes are possible. Thus vocabulary might be artificially constrained. The big hurdle, then, is the brain being capable of language of any kind, and the this does not have to be related to the ability to vocalise. So, yes, it could be sign-language, but pidgin/reduced-vocabulary language is there as an option. But I'm not welded to it.)

The less of a concept of property there is, the stronger society is, so from a societal strongpoint the mystery is backwards; how do the societies of creatures with a strong concept of private property simply not dissolve altogether?

This kind of "no common reference" is the kind of stumbling block we may, in fact, be seeing.  Like the society of reptilian-descended beings one might encounter in sci-fi, their practice of minimal care for their young (or total lack of it, beyond precautions to keep the initial clutch of eggs safe) seems to end up in a society with no concept of family - perhaps flexible fealty to a 'tribe of effective orphans' - and thus social standards that we find difficult to understand (and they, likewise, with our social setup).

The thing here is that, being thieves kobolds will generally end up with a lot of surplus junk they have stolen but which they have no real interest in.

What you say is possible, but I'm challenging the concept that they are 'thieves' outside of our own moral-relativism.  Redistribution of items (for whatever purpose...  perhaps some racial fear of too many like things being stacked on top of one another, they need to be 'smeared out a bit', items strewn across a site or taken to yet another site altogether, lest it annoy the kobold gods..?) is theft to us, but not to them.  And our practice (even in the semi-communistic system of settlement we currently 'enjoy') may be seen as something that the kobolds have to learn to reinterpret as no longer an anathema to their own relative morals...

Yes, Toady uses stuff like [UTTERANCES] and [THIEF] in has raws, but what does Toady know? He not smart like kobold. He just dumb human with dumb human 'standing of how universe really built!

[GoblinCookie]

(I'm currently reading a book where an evolved-from-canine-ancestors species is talking 'growled English' to the human characters (and other the other homonids, who are the ones who taught the canids, having picked it up themselves and usef it as their Lingua Franca, which is a bit of a stretch that I hope gets explained later!).  Anyway...  One has to imagine that even with 'utterances' (that I've never presumed to mean anything other than the tendency to be mumbly and/or sound like intejections, possibly Turets-like), it is possible for a suitable voice modulation to be possible, even if not all phonemes are possible. Thus vocabulary might be artificially constrained. The big hurdle, then, is the brain being capable of language of any kind, and the this does not have to be related to the ability to vocalise. So, yes, it could be sign-language, but pidgin/reduced-vocabulary language is there as an option. But I'm not welded to it.)

If the canine critters can speak even 'growled english' that is pretty fantastical, it should not actually be normally possible to 'speak' except to close evolutionary relatives.  The existence of 'language' is pretty common, since most creatures make noises of some kind to communicate concepts to eachother.  The difficult part is using a language that humans can actually speak.  Kobolds as I understand it are in that bind, while they speak they do not speak in a manner that humans can speak (and vica versa), this is why sign-language or writing is crucial.

Both humans and kobolds have hands. 

This kind of "no common reference" is the kind of stumbling block we may, in fact, be seeing.  Like the society of reptilian-descended beings one might encounter in sci-fi, their practice of minimal care for their young (or total lack of it, beyond precautions to keep the initial clutch of eggs safe) seems to end up in a society with no concept of family - perhaps flexible fealty to a 'tribe of effective orphans' - and thus social standards that we find difficult to understand (and they, likewise, with our social setup).

Care for one's young is effectively the precondition for the creation of anything that could be described as a society.  The only instance I can think of where creatures that do not care for their young form groups is basically swarms of locust.

What you say is possible, but I'm challenging the concept that they are 'thieves' outside of our own moral-relativism.  Redistribution of items (for whatever purpose...  perhaps some racial fear of too many like things being stacked on top of one another, they need to be 'smeared out a bit', items strewn across a site or taken to yet another site altogether, lest it annoy the kobold gods..?) is theft to us, but not to them.  And our practice (even in the semi-communistic system of settlement we currently 'enjoy') may be seen as something that the kobolds have to learn to reinterpret as no longer an anathema to their own relative morals...

Yes, Toady uses stuff like [UTTERANCES] and [THIEF] in has raws, but what does Toady know? He not smart like kobold. He just dumb human with dumb human 'standing of how universe really built!

In any case the economics that govern kobolds are the same as everything else.  The kobolds acquire stuff, consume stuff and whatever they have left over is surplus.  Stealing means the acquiring stuff part of things is unpredictable, resulting in massive surplus of some things and a shortage of others.